Drilling California: A Reality Check on the Monterey Shale provides the first publicly available empirical analysis of actual oil production data from the Monterey Formation. It lays out some of the play’s fundamental characteristics compared to other tight oil plays, including geological properties, current production, production potential, and associated environmental issues.
This provocative paper makes a convincing case for why the environmental community must embrace post-growth economics and community resilience in their efforts to address the climate crisis.
The rapid spread of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) has temporarily boosted US natural gas and oil production… and sparked a massive environmental backlash in communities across the country. The fossil fuel industry is trying to sell fracking as the biggest energy development of the century, with slick promises of American energy independence and benefits to local […]
In this landmark report, PCI Fellow David Hughes takes a far-ranging and painstakingly researched look at the prospects for various unconventional fuels to provide energy abundance for the United States in the 21st Century. While the report examines a range of energy sources, the centerpiece of “Drill, Baby, Drill” is a critical analysis of shale gas and shale oil (tight oil) and the potential of a shale “revolution.”
This is a Spanish translation of our 2013 report Drill, Baby, Drill. En Perfora, Chico, Perfora, J. David Hughes ha analizado en profundidad e investigado rigurosamente la posibilidad de diversos combustibles no convencionales para generar abundancia energetica. Aunque el informe se centra principalmente en cuestiones relacionadas con la producción del gas y el petróleo de […]
What magic, or monster, lurks behind the light switch and the gas pump? Where does the seemingly limitless energy that fuels modern society come from? From oil spills, nuclear accidents, mountaintop removal coal mining, and natural gas “fracking” to large-scale wind, solar, and biomass plants, every source of energy has costs. Featuring the essays found […]
The 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico briefly focused attention on how the oil and gas industry exploits public resources with little or no accountability. But the larger problem of how corporations and governments engage in a charade of regulation proceeds largely unnoticed. This sham regulatory process has failed to stem […]
There is a relationship between sustainability and beauty. Beauty is our way of describing encounters with life-affirmative patterns of relationships. The current energy economy produces ugliness, a form of violence against the world and its creatures, which have aesthetic worth and intrinsic value. Does our inability to speak forthrightly about ugliness make us unintentionally complicit […]
Malevolent threats to national security are the product of human choice, such as terrorists choosing to attack our electricity grid or oil production facilities in the Middle East. Malignant threats are associated with the collapse of a complex system — the electric grid, a human body, the Earth’s climate — when it is unintentionally disturbed […]
Destroying wild rivers to generate electricity is a false solution to humanity’s need for energy, with extremely high costs to individuals, communities, and ecosystems. The negative impacts of large dams are multidimensional—degrading watersheds, riparian zones, coastal ecosystems, and even oceans. We must reject the lure of megadams and the energy gluttony they perpetuate, which deters […]